Architect Address - 2023 In Review

Hello hello and welcome to this, the architect address! In case you didn't know, and that’s looking to be quite a few of you because damn we’ve got quite a few fresh faces around here since I last did one of these, this is a sort of irregular slightly improvised wrap up thing I release once every few videos to catch you up on my thoughts about particular videos, what’s going on with the channel lately, all that sort of stuff.

And on that note let’s talk about what things were like for the channel in 2023 which was, I think all in all - a bit mixed. I’ve had some real successes with a few videos towards the start of the year, with the vampire survivors one and the terra nil one doing really well but equally I’ve had a fair few stinkers and generally fairly slow growth over the course of the year. I think a lot of that has to do with a lack of uploads, I know I said I’d do more videos this year and wow that really didn’t come true, things slowed down a little bit and I think that’s because I ended up focusing on some more complex, abstract topic this year rather than just talking about why particular games were good and why I liked them which was interesting but I don’t think paid off in any material way.

I think that’s the widest lesson to take away from this year, for some stuff I put a lot of effort into addressing topics that were… I don’t know, a bit more profound or artistic or… those are terrible ways of describing what I’m getting at - y’know, stuff that’s a bit more high minded, and for a variety of reasons I don’t really feel like they worked very well. The two videos I talked about last time, the lovecraftian one and the creativity one I feel like had slightly more pretentious ambitions than a lot of the stuff I make but that didn’t really seem to work out very well. I think I work best when I sneak in the artistic and cultural insight whilst keeping things light rather than it being the focus because I’m not built for the sort of sentimentality and emotional pathos required by a lot of this stuff. In a weird way I’m kind of envious of a lot of youtubers who do these whole deeply personal videos about stuff that’s really meaningful to them because… I just do not think that way at all, I’m all about the detached big picture view and I think I need to play to that strength more.

Anyway, for next or rather this year I need to properly knuckle down and get stuff out faster, I know I just said I didn’t keep to that pledge last year get off my back but it’s the one thing that caused the lack of growth in 2023 because good videos can’t build momentum very effectively and bad ones absolutely kill any engagement on the channel for like, a month, it sucks - but hopefully with a better upload rate that won’t be quite so much of an issue.

Speaking of things I uploaded recently though, let’s have a little chat about the three most recent videos I released shall we? The first video is all about comedies, specifically focusing on Lethal Company, a fantastic game that I was very lucky to find out about as I was writing a video all about funny games. I think talking about jokes is really hard because you kind of have to spoil them in order to explain why they work. There’s a famous routine about explaining a joke being like dissecting a frog, you learn something but the frog dies and you see the reason why that’s funny is because… you get the picture.

The idea that really inspired me to make this video was an offhanded thought about there not being any current, universally liked comedy games like portal or the stanley parable, it seems like for the last decade and a bit we’ve more and more games that try to include humour and yet a lower success rate of actually funny games - with the root cause ultimately stemming from the fact that comedy writing in games, and to be honest writing in general for games being very different than writing for movies or TV or whatever. So all these writers who have experience in these other mediums, or alternative all the games people who wish they were writing for a different medium, can’t quite make jokes that work because they lack that player connection that you really need to keep in mind, and I think that’s a useful lens to view a lot of gaming writing through.

One of the interesting things I did in this one, partially because of necessity, was to do more cutaways from me talking than… I think I’ve ever done before, I included quite a few examples of jokes in games that either did or didn’t work as well as some of me and my friends playing lethal company and I’m normally reticent to do this as videogame dialogue or 3rd party quotes can be a bit of a tempo interruption from my usual lightning fast style of speech. However, I think not including them here would’ve been for the worst because I think with writing you need to include a few concrete examples to really demonstrate what you’re talking about and also I think those lethal company clips are really funny. Particularly the one with the turret my friend thinks is deactivated - I laugh every time.

Overall, the video did… okay I think, broadly fine, lots of positive comments and surprisingly few angry gamer babies opposing my half hearted defence of forespoken as well. Look it’s a bad game but it’s not… THAT bad okay, it’s just sort of consistently below average and whilst I obviously have no evidence for this, I suspect it would have gotten a bit less hate from certain circles if the protagonist wasn’t a black lady. The video though, yeah broadly fine, I think vids that are me writing about writing tend to be a bit on the risky side views wise but I really like doing them because it’s for once me speaking with any degree of authority at all so I’m going to keep doing them. I’ve always wanted to do a video on worldbuilding and why games are bad at that so maybe expect something along those lines this year. Who knows.

The next video I’d like to chat about and the final real episode of this year is one all about clones and lemme tell you it’s done substantially better than I thought it was going to do and WAAAAY better than last year’s sprint to the finish bash one out at the end video which is one of the worst performing vids I’ve ever made. Even more surprising, I put it out on boxing day which is something you’re not supposed to do especially if it’s a topic that’s not holiday or new year related and that didn’t seem to matter either, weird.

I guess soulslikes are a fairly crowdpleasy topic and the thesis of the video is mostly something people agree with anyway, lies of p is good, lords of the fallen is bad, remnant and jedi fallen order are just okay but I think I do have a bit of a chance to say some interesting stuff about clones and the way we look at the relationship between games as well. A lot of the time I think we’re quite harsh towards games that are iterations on a formula rather than being totally unique and conveniently forget about that when we look back and realise how good they were the whole time. Way back in the day a lot of people shittalked Terraria and look at that game now, woah.

I did notice some weird things about this video though, first being that I seem to find myself talking about the original doom a lot and that’s weird given that I don’t think it holds up particularly well, it’s older than me and I only first played it a few years ago - I guess it’s a very influential game but still, it’s in danger of becoming another XCOM that I sort of refer to by default and I want to have a broader spread of references. Also, something I’m pleased to see is people disagreeing with me and saying they like remnant 2 without being dicks about it, I really like the fact that a) I’m not treated as gospel because I am not an expert and b) I’ve cultivated an environment of… mostly, good faith disagreement, I don’t get involved very often but I think a lot of the discussions in the comments of my videos are generally pretty good. Not amazing because it’s still youtube but okay in the grand scheme and that’s heartening to see.

Speaking earlier of leaning into the channel’s strengths I quite like making these, sort of culture of videogames talking about how we think about games videos rather than directly looking at their design ones, that feels like something I do quite well that doesn’t really appear very often elsewhere on youtube. All in all though, solid video if not a super memorable one in my opinion, it might be the holiday blitz but I barely remember making it but hopefully it’s one people enjoyed.

Finally, we’ve got the last video of the year and that’s games you should have played 2023 and my god do I like making these but also they sure do take it out of me, cobbling together an entire video in the space of just under a week is very hard work and not something I relish having to do often, but I do like getting a chance to spend the last month ish of the year playing through all the really good games I missed and coming up with fun ways to tell you all how good they are.

Honestly I missed some absolute crackers this year, void stranger and your only move is hustle were very late entries that seem to have gone down very well, and it seems like I didn’t include too many obvious picks everyone’s already heard of either. It’s always a struggle which games to cut because of notoriety, a very long time ago I cut celeste from the list because I thought it was too popular despite being great and that was a real mistake and so I’m a bit paranoid about which games to keep and which to cut. Pizza tower and lethal company went out because they’re basically the biggest indie games of the year but I think maybe dredge and myhouse dot wad could’ve gotten cut as well as the former was in the game awards and is therefore automatically mainstream and the other was all over the place on youtube, who knows it’s impossible to make a perfect list given the unique criteria my vid operates on so I’m not too fussed.

One thing I AM fussed about, however, is my little slay the princess amateur dramatics at the end, not only was that entire segment cobbled together at like 3AM when I was very sleep deprived and not deserving of the praise it got, but also people thought I was the main male voice actor Jonathan Sims who’s actually talented and more importantly sounds nothing like me - I guess we’re both english? But unfortunately that does make anyone who confused us racist. Slay the princess is great by the way. It was a real fight for top place but I think STP wins purely on uniqueness value alone and I’ve not seen any big outlets talking about it so hopefully the game gets the players it rightfully deserves.

Any more stray thoughts… uhhh… I think my comedy bits this year for the end of the year video were a bit on the weak side and I could’ve stood to mention the fact that although we got a lot of great games, a bunch of developers also lost their jobs so it might be the last good year for games but I just couldn’t quite squeeze it in somewhere natural sounding, I dunno. But broadly the video did about as well as I could have expected, the end segment drew a LOAD of new patrons who I am very glad to see, seriously that decision I made I think last year or the year before to have my runners up be patron exclusives was very clever well done me. Aaaaand that’s it, I can’t think of anything else.

This has been a marathon video so I think I’ll leave it there, hope you’re all looking forward to 2024, oh that’s one more thing I said 2014 instead of 2024 at the end of that video and it was very embarrassing I’m a dumbdumb, anyway, bye!